Are you or a loved one feeling serpentine lately? The QAnon-right thinks your COVID-19 vaccine might have been laced with snake blood to inject you with Satan’s DNA.
The false claim is the subject of a new documentary by a far-right bounty hunter turned podcast host. It’s just as baseless as other vaccine conspiracy theories before it (remember the 5G hoax?), but the fraud is going viral on right-wing social media. “There’s a lot of debate whether it’s cobra DNA, is it krait snake DNA,” says Fever Dreams host Will Sommer. “But this sort of gives you a glimpse at the ideas that are taking off.
Baseless conspiracy theories also took over the Colorado GOP this weekend, when the party held its assembly to decide which candidates will make the primary ballot. The event’s biggest stars: Stop The Steal politicians like Tina Peters, a county clerk currently facing multiple felony charges for allegedly leaking her county’s voting machine data to conspiracy theorists like Ron Watkins and Mike Lindell. The day’s other fringe-right victories included a gubernatorial nomination for Joe Oltmann, another conspiracy podcaster currently being sued for promoting hoaxes about supposed election fraud. Oltmann declined the nomination. If he’d won the GOP primary, he’d be fighting to unseat Democratic Gov. Jared Polis. Oltmann has previously suggested hanging Polis and other politicians.
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The Colorado GOP is “wracked with debate over whether to be a nominally mainstream institution, or just a batshit Stop the Steal franchise,” host Kelly Weill says.
Colorado isn’t the only state grappling with less-than-ideal GOP candidates. Dr. Mehmet Oz got a nudge in Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary race this weekend after he scored Donald Trump’s coveted endorsement. It’s a match made in reality television heaven.
During frequent appearances to discuss COVID-19 on Fox News, Oz would give “soliloquy after soliloquy about why hydroxychloroquine was so promising,” host Asawin Suebsaeng says. “Would it surprise you that, in doing so, he caught the attention of then-leader of the free world Donald Trump just by virtue of being on Fox News? We did some reporting on this at the time, that he so thoroughly enraptured Trump that Trump would call senior administration officials and public health honchos into the Oval Office repeatedly to tell them that you need to get on the phone with Dr. Oz.”
But it’s unclear whether the support will be enough for Oz to win his primary, possibly further endangering Trump’s already shaky status as a Republican kingmaker.
While the two aging television stars make a play for Pennsylvania, younger Republicans are setting their eyes on TikTok. Taylor Lorenz, a technology reporter at The Washington Post, joins us to discuss how the video app is competing for Gen Z eyeballs. “There’s this rising class of political pundits, and they’re also overwhelmingly pretty right-leaning,” Lorenz says.
But sometimes the misinformation is coming from outside the house. Lorenz discusses her recent reporting on Facebook, which hired the conservative PR firm Targeted Victory to spread scary rumors about TikTok, like a hoax claiming that TikTokers were participating in a “slap a teacher” challenge.
“Facebook had actually hired Targeted Victory to amplify rumors like these in local press,” Lorenz says. “They worked with tons of consulting firms around the country to basically push out stories that were smearing TikTok.”
Finally, after two years of feuds over masks on planes, Trump fans have found a new way to be obnoxious at the airport. A new trend has Republicans tricking airport staffers into paging fake passengers with names that sound like right-wing memes, like “Let’s go Brandon.”
Sommer says the trend speaks to “the prankishness of the American right right now.”
“He does it and has his little snicker at the Cinnabon,” he says of one prominent airport prankster, “but these videos rack up tens of thousands of views.”
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